


Kind of Magical

by volti



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Bisexual Male Character, First Kiss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 22:57:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7733053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volti/pseuds/volti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean only ever admitted to a first kiss when asked directly, and even then, he never went into detail. Never felt the need to. His kisses, dates, none of that was anyone’s business but his own, and his prided himself on having a sense of privacy.</p><p>...Okay, it was because he’d only ever been kissed once. In <i>middle school.</i> No one ever counted kisses from middle school as “real.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kind of Magical

**Author's Note:**

> This was for secret-fujoshi on Tumblr, and also my first time actually writing JeanMarco. I know it's on the shorter side of one-shots, but I hope you enjoy it all the same!

Jean only ever admitted to a first kiss when asked directly, and even then, he never went into detail. Never felt the need to. His kisses, dates, none of that was anyone’s business but his own, and his prided himself on having a sense of privacy.

...Okay, it was because he’d only ever been kissed once. In _middle school._ No one ever counted kisses from middle school as “real,” first or otherwise. It was like slow-dancing at a social, only the chaperones were watching you like hawks, so you had no choice but to hold each other at arm’s length and figure out which eye you were supposed to look into. If you were even supposed to make eye contact at all.

For what it was worth, it had been with a nice enough girl in his seventh-grade class. Christa Renz. She was good at math and always wore her hair in a side braid, he remembered. He’d been waiting for her at her locker after school, because his mother used to drive them to piano lessons together, and she’d just asked him. If he’d ever kissed anyone before. And he’d spent enough time doing homework with her in the backseat of the station wagon that he could actually tell her the truth.

And Christa said she hadn't either. And then asked if he wanted to try it. And all those questions about pre-algebra and earth science let him say, “Sure.”

So she kissed him, in the empty hallway, with her locker mirror reflecting on both of them, for all of two seconds. The only thing he really remembered about it was that it was soft, and that it tasted like that Lip Smackers Chapstick all the girls seemed to use and trade. Cotton candy, he thought.

But that was four years ago, and Christa had moved to a different city for high school. Something about her dad’s job. They still instant messaged back and forth, and the last Jean heard, she had a girlfriend now and stopped braiding her hair. He kind of wondered if she was happier like that. Or if she ever felt like she needed to kiss him because he was a boy.

He didn't _entirely_ feel that way himself. But a small part of him did, later. Felt like because he liked girls as much as he liked boys, that he could… get away with something, somehow. That if he tried hard enough, he could squash that “other” part of him. And he couldn't stand it. Couldn't stand how wrong _that_ felt. Like it was an “other” part to begin with.

At least, he fought with it until Marco happened.

Jean really didn't have another word for it. Marco really did just “happen.” Happened to have a few classes with him, happened to be in the higher honors pre-calculus class and was nice enough to offer homework help. Happened to play viola in the orchestra room after school, the same room where Jean still practiced sometimes. Happened to tell Jean not to go once, when he offered to relocate to the cheaper piano in the storage room. To ask for accompaniment. To compliment his playing. To invite him, a couple of weeks later, to the school’s Gay/Straight Alliance meetings on Wednesdays in the physics classroom—the room where Jean realized, let it really sink in, that “bisexual” was a word that described other people, too.

To invite him to do homework together. To come out in safe spaces. To grow close in closed places.

To tell him, months later on a run to the food truck parked outside the school, that he liked him. Just like that, he liked him. Had for a while.

And all Jean could do was stand there, holding a shrink-wrapped soft cookie and a bottle of soda, and say, “What?” Because it wasn't like anyone had ever _liked_ him like that before. Not Christa. Definitely not Mikasa Ackerman, the girl who sat at the front of the room in AP chemistry, no matter how hard that little bit of him hoped for it.

So Marco said it again, _I like you,_ and Jean noticed that this time, Marco’s hands were shaking. Like he was expecting rejection, or worse, isolation. Then he said, snacks in hand and change in his pocket, “Do you still want to come to my house and do math homework?”

And Jean swallowed, tucked his food away, and made a grab for Marco’s hand when he said, “Yeah.” And it didn't have anything to do with doing enough homework or playing enough music or going to enough meetings. The only “enough” was Marco. He was enough. He was… right. And maybe ten years later he'd call himself a stupid teenager for saying so. But he wasn't stupid now. He was just a teenager.

When he got home that night, the first thing he said was, “I think I have a boyfriend, Mama.” And his mother made sure to look him in the eyes when she said, “Okay, honey.”

That was it. Nothing to get away with, or from, or anything. If they were asked, they gave one-word admissions, and Jean would be silently relieved that Marco, although a little more tactful in his delivery, held his—their—privacy just as sacred. They still did math homework together, still practiced in the orchestra room (Marco for upcoming concerts, Jean to prove to at least himself that he had the handiwork in him after all the years). They tagged along on the walk to one another’s classes and wrapped arms around each other’s shoulders in secluded stairwells, in the right kind of quiet.

And maybe, if Jean thought about it hard enough, it was more like they were best friends who held something more intimate between them. Weren't relationships supposed to be like that anyway? Without the pressure to do more? Be more? To prove themselves to people who probably wouldn't matter in a couple years’ time?

Maybe that was why at least a month passed before Marco bumped knees with him, in one of those empty stairwells with their haul from the food truck, and asked, “Have you ever kissed anyone before?”

Jean almost dropped his can of soda. Then he swallowed hard, gathered himself, and mumbled, “Technically.” He’d never had to call it “technical.” 

Marco set down his bag of chips between them—to share, presumably—and stretched out his legs along the stairs. “What do you mean, technically?” 

And Marco was the first person he told about Christa, about her side braid and the Lip Smackers chapstick and the mirror in her locker. Marco, with his viola and his math homework and his salt-and-vinegar chips, was the first person Jean told that middle school first kisses couldn't possibly count for anything. Marco, with his ankles crossed and his hands perched on the stairs behind him, was the first person to say, “Can't they?”

And all Jean could do was shrug and say, “I don't know.”

Maybe it was a good thing that Marco didn't look disappointed. “I mean, did you like it? Did you want to do it in the first place?”

“Well, yeah. That's why I did it.”

“Not because you felt like you had to, to fit in or something?”

Jean froze, and shrank into himself when he answered in a voice just above a whisper. “Maybe a little.”

Marco gave him a nod, like he understood, really understood, and sat up straight, filling the silence with the crinkle of his bag of chips. “Sometimes I wonder what it feels like,” he said after a moment. He had a soft smile on his face, and he was looking down at his shoelaces. Actually dreamy. “If it's like how they always show it on TV. You know what I mean, Jean? Like…” He shifted, clapped the salt and grease off his hands. “Like in those few seconds, time actually stops or something. It looks kind of magical, doesn't it?”

Jean tucked his knees in toward his chest. “I guess so.” He'd heard too many spin-the-bottle stories, heard about too many minutes in heaven, to agree completely. Where was the magic in it if everyone around him treated it like a conquest, or a rite of passage, or the only thing that could possibly make him a person. Wasn't magic supposed to live in non-humans?

Marco was talking again. “Maybe it's all about where and when and how it happens,” he mused, staring out into the corridor now. “Or maybe it's all about how… on the outside it could look like the most ordinary thing, but once you’re in the moment, it consumes you, or something. It’s scary to think about doing, when you’re faced with it, but you still want to do it anyway. It makes you hazy. All your consciousness goes into it, and you don't want to stop, but once you do, you understand. The magic was right there. Got away from you while you weren't looking.”

Even the way Marco spoke made him sound like he was in a trance. Like the words drew themselves out, little by little. He spoke them like a dream, and if Jean wasn't careful, he would trip and fall headlong into it. But Jean didn't trip, and he didn't fall. He leaned in, willingly, and turned Marco’s face toward his, eyes drifting toward the creases in his lips and the splash of freckles across his nose. 

“Are you scared right now?” he asked in the space between them.

He could practically hear the hitch in Marco’s breath before his reply. “No.”

So he jumped, willingly, and took Marco with him, as he pressed their mouths together.

Marco was right. And wrong. He could feel himself slipping into some kind of haze. He could feel, under his skin, the urge to kiss and kiss and kiss, in the cold, quiet monotony of the stairwell. There was nothing like a conquest about it. Nothing that shattered them into humans. And the magic was right there, in the moment, right where they could feel it. But they were looking, with their eyes closed. With their fingers, caught on jaw lines and in shirt sleeves. With their hearts, pounding in their ears and in their throats, drowning out all sound in the moments before Jean pulled back. 

His fingers were shaking, still resting on Marco’s cheek.

The first thing Marco said was, “Oh.” Oh. That was what it felt like.

Jean swallowed. “Is that a bad oh?”

Marco shook his head, pushed the chip bag aside as he scooted closer. “A good oh. A”—he chewed on his lip for a moment—”a magical oh. A ‘let's do that again so I can remember what it feels like’ oh.”

“A ‘let's stop time again’ oh,” Jean murmured, leaning forward with little mind for chapstick, or piano lessons, or which first was the real first.

He didn't care. He didn't care.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/omnistruck) and a [Tumblr](http://voltisubito.tumblr.com) where you can follow me!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Kind of Magical](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8991448) by [ZoeBug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZoeBug/pseuds/ZoeBug)




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